Dealing with Burstiness in Multi-Tier Applications: Models and Their Parameterization

Workloads and resource usage patterns in enterprise applications often show burstiness resulting in large degradation of the perceived user performance. In this paper, the authors propose a methodology for detecting burstiness symptoms in multi-tier applications but, rather than identifying the root cause of burstiness, they incorporate this information into models for performance prediction. The modeling methodology is based on the index of dispersion of the service process at a server, which is inferred by observing the number of completions within the concatenated busy times of that server.